Book Review

Canada and the United States

The history of American popular religion, religious innovation, and "unchurched" religious experience outside the confines of sects and denominations provides ample evidence of the use of mind-altering substances including peyote, LSD, jimson weed, hallucinogenic mushrooms, marijuana, wine, and coffee, which have served as "elixirs of ecstasy." Here religiously motivated drug use assisted individuals in their spiritual quest for innerworldly mystical experience. Drugs were also integral to rituals that sustained communities of faith. Robert C. Fuller even suggests, citing psychopharmacology, that human societies actively pursue drug-induced intoxication as a spiritual quest for ecstasy, akin to a species-specific fourth drive added to the basic drives of hunger, thirst, and sex. He develops this interdisciplinary approach, combining secondary historical sources with anthropological and sociological writings, to examine four descriptive case studies: Native American religions and the peyote cult of the Native American Church; psychedelics and metaphysical illumination during the counterculture in the 1960s; wine use among denominations and new religious movements; and coffee and marijuana in unchurched spirituality.	1
Fuller wishes to avoid generalizations about Native American religions. Nevertheless, he develops an ideal typical construct that is not situated within any concrete tribal or historical context. According to this formulaic approach, Native Americans have devised a religious complex ("New World Narcotic Complex") that invests sacred meaning to botanicals that aid in the interaction with the spirit world. Shamans variously employ tobacco, tulpi, datura, and mescal to attain ritualized ecstasy and to communicate with the supernatural world by means of trances, vision quests, and divinations. "The Shamanic Complex"—the ecstatic flights of the soul—allow these specialists to diagnose and cure, find lost objects, predict the future, protect persons from supernatural and natural dangers, and maintain and restore harmonious relations with the spirit world.	2
Fuller employs this ideal type in a compelling account of peyotism among Huichol and other southwestern tribes during early Spanish colonization and the subsequent Americanization and Christianization of this religion following the failure of the Ghost Dance revitalization in 1890 and the devastating consequences of reservation life. The pan-Indian movement incorporated in 1918 as the Native American Church was a syncretism of Christian sacramental ritual and Native American shamanism. Fuller recounts the decades of state suppression of the ritual use of peyote and the recent United States Supreme Court decisions and Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1993) that have legitimated peyote use. Peyote religion, however, like other Native religious practices, was not repressed only because of sacramental drug use. Missionary groups, Indian boarding schools, Bureau of Indian Affairs agents on reservations, and even "progressive" tribal factions actively attempted to eradicate Native language, mythology, and religion.	3
The discussion of the psychedelic movement carefully details the rise of LSD as a medium to achieve metaphysical illumination of an alternative reality. Championed by Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and others, Fuller asserts that this movement restructured American religion. Following the emergence of the Hippie counterculture in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury during the 1967 Summer of Love and the allure of Eastern mysticisms associated with the Fourth Great Awakening after World War II, "psychedelics led a good many Americans down the road toward a more Romantic, postmodern, and unchurched form of spiritual thinking. Even among those who didn't use them, psychedelics were a symbol of metaphysical illumination available to all who venture past the narrow confines of consensus religion" (p. 89).	. . .